Class Of `89 Prepared For U. Of C. Rigors

September 23, 1985|By Howard Witt.

At the University of Chicago, where more than 800 freshmen arrived on campus Sunday to settle in for a new academic year, students are not apt to wear their accomplishments on their sleeves. They just don`t cut shirts that long.

Take Benjamin Venator, 18, of Boston, for instance. He has lived with a family in Japan, toured the Soviet Union and scored 4s and 5s (the highest possible marks) on advanced-placement tests in calculus, English, Latin and history. He plans to study for a career in the foreign service.

``I think I can handle most anything anybody throws at me,`` Venator said, without any hint of immodesty, as he contemplated the legendary academic rigors of the university. ``I don`t mind hard work. I can handle it.``

Or consider Lisa Marie McLeod of San Diego. Only very reluctantly does the 18-year-old disclose that she has piloted airplanes, driven formula race cars and worked as a successful model.

``I just don`t want people to think of me like that,`` McLeod said as she unpacked her belongings in the tiny Snell Hall dormitory room that will be her home for the next nine months. ``That`s not who I am.``

Indeed, most every member of the class of 1989 boasts (or more accurately, declines to boast) equivalent credentials. And if they didn`t already know it, admissions dean Dan Hall laid it out for them during Sunday`s traditional Opening Convocation in the gothic majesty of Rockefeller Chapel.

``You are an impressive group,`` Hall said. He then proceeded to tick off a few relevant statistics: Half the freshmen were in the top 5 percent of their high school classes; the class as a group ranked in the 98th percentile on college entrance exams; 12 percent edited their high school newspapers; 19 percent were active in drama, speech and music.

``I already have a boyfriend in Pennsylvania, at Wharton,`` McLeod said.

``I`m not really very social myself,`` said the amiable Venator. ``I`m not a partier, I don`t drink and I don`t smoke.``

``The ratio is nice, I guess,`` said Jackie Edelberg, 18, of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who went on to ponder the much-rumored lack of social life at the university. ``They say people here are just a bunch of grinds. I wonder if they really are as antisocial as people say.``

The University of Chicago has earned a reputation as a place where undergraduates are expected to play academic hardball and squeeze their less cerebral pursuits into study breaks. And sociology professor Donald Levine, who as dean of the undergraduate college presides over one of the most demanding curriculums in the country, did nothing to dispel that impression as he addressed the 94th freshman class.

``Today there is great pressure on colleges to prepare students to step effortlessly into some job,`` Levine said. ``You have come here to acquire that most useful of all vocational skills, a rigorous and able mind.``

The students who come here, of course, would have it no other way. In fact, some express resentment that their university is not better known among their peers for its academic rigor.

``The only problem with the University of Chicago is that when you tell people where you go, they ask, `Oh, is that a public school or something?`

`` said Zem Sternberg, 20, a junior from Brookline, Mass., who is helping with freshman orientation programs. ``There`s an instant recognition if you say

`Harvard` or `Yale` that you don`t get here.``

Sternberg, whose brother attends Harvard and whose father is a mathematics professor there, said that ``this place is a lot more rigorous than Harvard.``